The use case for AI is spam

Don't forget porn.

Though it's a use case people like Satya will want to avoid for reasons.

"Why d'you think the net was born? Porn, Porn, Porn"

Adult conversation mode is just the start.

spam implies low effort BS used in a low-hanging-fruit sense

LLMs will be used for aggressive, yet incredibly subtle manipulation, consensus building, and response tracking.

20-40% of social media is already bots, and in the future it is likely you will not be able to reply to anything anywhere without a bot either 1) responding, or 2) logging and sending your response to multiple parties instantly.

If the Stasi had LLMs the Berlin Wall would have never fallen

This comment speaks the truth, yet HN doesn't want to hear it.

There's a reason SBF was arrested and tried within a year while other complex financial fraud cases take years to get a conviction.

Dec 11, 2008: Madoff arrested; scheme revealed.

March 12, 2009: Madoff pleads guilty to 11 federal felonies.

June 29, 2009: Sentenced to 150 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $17.179 billion.

In Madoff's case, he confessed to his sons. So again, this was a case of an insider having the goods, not the result of a speedy investigation.

Your timeline is correct, but once Madoff was confronted he just confessed and everything moved forward.

I mean yeah Madoff confessed and made the case open and shut.

SBF entered a Not Guilty plea but Ellison for all intents and purposes entered a Guilty plea on his behalf with her co-operation.

She also had no choice, as SBF was blaming her. The point being that they still didn't really need her help. It was obvious that he committed fraud, and there was plenty of proof of it.

I wonder what this means for DC Comics and the current crop of DC films. Will Netflix prefer to start with a clean slate?

The use case for AI is spam.

It's the reverse printing press, drowning all purposeful human communication in noise.

Another major use case for it is enabling students to more easily cheat on their homework. Which is why it is probably going to end up putting Chegg out of business.

I am shocked when I talk to college kids about AI these days.

I try to explain stuff to them like regurgitating the training data, context window limits, and confabulation.

They stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA LA it does my homework for me nothing else matters LA LA LA LA i can't hear you"

They really do not care about the Turing Test. Today's LLMs pass the "snowed my teaching assistant test" and nothing else matters.

Academic fraud really is the killer app for this technology. At least if you're a 19-year-old.

These kids are only in school to get a meal ticket to white-collar job interviews. AI frees them to be honest about their intentions, rather than pretend for long enough to stumble their way into learning something.

Maybe AI will finally skewer the myth that an undergraduate degree means anything.

AI brought “let someone else do it for you” cheating to the middle class, no longer the domain of wealthy flunkies.

British Airways as well. N

The use case for AI is spam.

> I assumed, like President said, that it will be China, not me, who pays the tariffs. I was very much wrong.

How do you run a business that relies on imports and not know how tariffs work?

Because America is rich and they like to buy things.

Or Waltz has been leaking to Goldberg and every other journalist in his contacts and did it by accident.

I have been reading spy thrillers recently and my pet toy theory was that this was an attempt to unmask a mole. Leak information and see who publishes it.

Politicians regularly intentionally leak information they want leaked, and politicians also encounter leaks that they don't want leaked. Perhaps Goldberg did the only thing he could - he identified the trap.

I mean if it was trading at $8/share isn't the market rate $8/share?

Kinda, but it's complicated. The share price is the number that people will buy and sell as many shares are as actually getting traded, but once you get to significant fractions of the whole company, the marginal cost of the next share can diverge wildly — if one party is trying to get all of them, that may drive up the price a bit, and for any given fraction of ownership there's always someone who sees the share price go up and thinks "hey, I can get even more profit if I hold on for a bit longer!"

Liquidity matters

This. The same thing is happening with Tesla stock. Since it's such a bit part of the S&P500, so half of retail investors buy it in their basket of portfolios and 401ks at trades at 10x it's worth on paper by looking at fundamentals.

That reasoning would lead to concluding all the businesses in SP500 are traded at 10x their worth on paper. Or at least all the ones with market caps greater than Tesla.

Edit, since I hit posting limit.

To pooper:

> Since it's such a big part of the S&P500

The conclusion is based on that premise, so any other business that satisfies that premise should also lead to the same conclusion.

To llm:

> I think their point is that businesses at the top of the S&P500 are traded at sentiment and momentum based values that are pretty disconnected from a logical P/E

I have read the same about other businesses many times. There is nothing logical about only using P/E as a factor in determining price (or “worth”). No one knows the future, so even a price derived from an arbitrary standard of P/E is a “sentiment and momentum based” value.

I think their point is that businesses at the top of the S&P500 are traded at sentiment and momentum based values that are pretty disconnected from a logical P/E, which is valid enough. The multiple happens to be 10x in Tesla's case, it's not 10x for all of them (in the case of Saudi Aramco it's probably less than 1x), but it's much less of an informed valuation than the sheer volume of trading would make you think.

Index adda pop and deletes drop in price.

So index membership does change the stock multiple (but not by 10x).

Also, Tesla is an idiosyncratic stock with very high volatility and very high retail participation. Things can be true of Tedla stock which do not have to be true of the median stock.

Can you please elaborate on this? I am unable to follow the logic here.

I'm claiming this based on fundamental analysis of Tesla's sales/net profits/ROIIC and other metrics, which I take from their 13F fillings (AKA quarterly earning reports) compared to other car manufacturers.

Some stocks are overpriced, and others are undervalued. The inclusion in the S&P500 alone is just 1 of the factors.

In my opinion, Apple and NVIDIA are significantly undervalued based on their fundamentals, even though they make up a gigantic % of the SPX.

I understand, and I’m claiming there is no one logical or fundamental way to derive a price.

It could be logical to ascribe some value to a business’s leader having access to a US president known to be “open for business”? And we know a big tax bill is likely to be passed by year’s end.

Perhaps that will lead to good fortunes for Tesla shareholders. Or maybe not.

You can derive the "true price" with a certain probability. Of course, unexpected things can happen, like Musk being assassinated, but the stock market is not completely unpredictable.

And the thing is, I don't have to be right about Tesla because I'm not making a single bet on that company. I'm making hundreds of bets using my methodology, and it's enough that I'm right 50-something% of the time (or even less than 50%, if we're talking Options trading).

That's what the whole stock market game is about. Hence, some investment companies, like Berkshire Hathaway, consistently make more than others over the long term.

haven’t had my coffee yet but I assume you meant “big” rather than “bit”

yup, i haven't had my coffee yet when I was writing it either :)

LOL, serious question. Is coffee to writing really a thing? It sounds a bit weird to me, but maybe it's shorthand? :)

It's that we open Hacker News right after we wake up and post comments before our brains are in full power, hence the mistakes. Coffee is not a necessity, but most people drink it. I believe it's not exactly about caffeine but letting the brain 30 minutes or so to "wake up" to stop making mistakes. At least, that's how it works in my case.

Aha, thanks very much for the detailed explanation. Absolutely makes sense.

It takes some time to complete the process, so the price is usually based on the likely future value. For companies increasing in value, the offer is usually higher than the current price, and for campanies decreasing in value, it's usually lower.

Also, corrections aren't instant, so if the change of value was for something that had already happened, not something currently happening, the offer will reflect the expected price that the shares would settle at.